Alamogordo

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. The road into Clovis had been tortuous but tinted with the colors of the New Mexico desert subtly touched by the incipient autumn. Driving a military Jeep with a comrade from their former B-17 squadrons in Europe, Joseph Angelina thought how different it would be to fly in this clear, dry air, so remarkably pure after his recent years of trying to locate enemy targets in cloudy and moody Europe

Clocking Koufax

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Walking out of the tunnels of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, even after the roaring crowds had departed in compressed streams of red taillights, was the best part of the evening, John Angelina had decided early in the baseball season. Especially now that the Orioles were headed for a pennant and possibly the World Series, the line of groupies would wait for the pitchers. Not that the other players or positions were any less attractive, it was just something about the pitchers. Particularly that battery of pitchers that year that would in fact find heroes in all unlikely places and circumstances; that year that would deliver a resounding win at the World Series against the legendary Los Angeles Dodgers and the brilliant Sandy Koufax

Economic policy from an evolutionary perspective: the case of Finland

In the last decade, the Finnish economy has shown an unprecedented recovery, after being hit by a deep crisis in the early 1990s. The paper views and interprets this successful transformation process based on ICT from an evolutionary perspective. Although the rapid pace of the restructuring of the Finnish economy suggests a break with the past, this remarkable recovery was firmly rooted in its economic history. In addition, Finnish public policy played its role in turning Finland into a knowledge economy. Although a master plan for the Finnish economy was lacking, many policies worked out quite well together over an extended period. Building on education, research and technology policy initiatives taken in the 1970s and 1980s, the deep economic crisis in the early 1990s paved the way for new policy directions, with a focus on network-facilitating innovation policies.evolutionary economics, economic geography, innovation policy, Finnish economy, Finnish policy, ICT cluster

A theoretical framework for Evolutionary Economic Geography: Industrial dynamics and urban growth as a branching process

We propose a framework that specifies the process of economic development as an evolutionary branching process of product innovations. Each product innovation provides a growth opportunity for an existing firm or a new firm, and for an existing city or a new city. One can then obtain both firm size and city size distributions as two aggregates resulting from a single evolutionary process. Gains from variety at the firm level (economies of scope) and the urban level (Jacobs externalities) provide the central feedback mechanism in economic development generating strong path dependencies in the spatial concentration of industries and the specialisation of cities. Gains from size are also expected, yet these are ultimately bounded by increasing wages. The contribution of our framework lies in providing a micro-foundation of economic geography in terms of the interplay between industrial dynamics and urban growth. The framework is sufficiently general to investigate systematically a number of stylised facts in economic geography, while at the same time it is sufficiently flexible to be extended such as to become applicable in more specific micro-contexts. A number of extensions related to the concepts of knowledge spillover and lock-in, are also discussed.evolutionary economic geography, urban growth, firm growth, Zipf, branching, innovation

Expanding the Role of Synthetic Data at the U.S. Census Bureau

National Statistical offices (NSOs) create official statistics from data collected directly from survey respondents, from government administrative records and from other third party sources. The raw source data, regardless of origin, is usually considered to be confidential. In the case of the U.S. Census Bureau, confidentiality of survey and administrative records microdata is mandated by statute, and this mandate to protect confidentiality is often at odds with the needs of data users to extract as much information as possible from rich microdata. Traditional disclosure protection techniques applied to resolve this tension have resulted in official data products that come no where close to fully utilizing the information content of the underlying microdata. Typically, these products take for the form of basic, aggregate tabulations. In a few cases anonymized public-use micro samples are made available, but these are increasingly under risk of re-identification by the ever larger amounts of information about individuals and firms that is available in the public domain. One potential approach for overcoming these risks is to release products based on synthetic or partially synthetic data where values are simulated from statistical models designed to mimic the (joint) distributions of the underlying microdata rather than making the actual underlying microdata available. We discuss recent Census Bureau work to develop and deploy such products. We also discuss the benefits and challenges involved with extending the scope of synthetic data products in official statistics